Tag Archives: Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) are essential techniques for driving users to your website properties. These core tactics are similar, but not the same.

SEM and SEO are often confused, particularly since these acronyms only differ by one letter. Of course, if they were the same thing, we wouldn’t name them different things. Plus, it’s the acronym that’s different, not the underlying meaning.

I’ve found an easy way to remember these different tactics. These may help you differentiate for your extended strategy teams. If you’re a content strategist, it is essential to know how SEO and SEO work together.

SEM: Paid Advertising for Driving Traffic to Your Website
For SEM, the “M” may as well stand for “money.” That’s a nod to the fact that this includes an out of pocket (OOP) expense.

SEM works for a wide range of click traffic to websites, mobile properties, YouTube, apps, and more. Google and Bing give brands many options for driving traffic. For simplicity, let’s just talk about website traffic for now, even though your specific needs may be in a different channel.

It has been pointed out that this isn’t marketing at all. That’s true. SEM is primarily paid advertising. At some point, there was an effort to rename this search engine advertising, but the name didn’t stick.

The dominant player in SEM is Google. Their Google AdWords platform accounts for the majority of their billions of dollars in income. Google earns money each time someone clicks on a paid ad, which is why SEM is also referenced as pay per click (PPC).

Google AdWords and Microsoft’s Bing Ads both work from a similar auction-style model. There are limited ad slots and users bid for top slots. The highest qualified bidder (more on this later) will get the top slot. Continue reading →

Writing is easy. Writing well is hard. (But with some practice, you can do it.)

If you’re a content marketer, you probably spend a lot of time at the keyboard. You may not think of your emails, tweets, and creative briefs as “writing with a capital W,” but it is writing nonetheless. You may as well be good at it.

I read “Everybody Writes” a few years ago when I interviewed Ann at Content Marketing World. I decided that my own writing needed a bit of improvement, so I descended on Ann’s book with my trusty highlighter. Ann’s book on writing is the book that professional writers read for inspiration and instruction. Continue reading →

As if enough praise hasn’t already been heaped upon Tesla Motors, here’s a bit more. This time, it’s not about the car. It’s about the marketing of the car and what it says about us.

The Tesla is just another car. When you get down to it, it’s a manufactured to serve a utilitarian purpose. It gets you from Point A to Point B. All cars are designed to do this, and so is a Tesla. Continue reading →

In the first post of this series on content analytics, I talked about the old way of measuring your marketing content with key performance indicators (KPIs) and why you can’t rely on old measurement models for new media channels. In the second post, I offered an analytics framework for measuring content KPIs along a user-journey continuum.

This leads me to the third post in this three-part series on measurement. In this post, I’m focusing on how you can measure the actions on the page to determine how users are interacting with your content. Or not.

Of course, there’s a rather basic problem here. You want to measure the performance of your content and tools, but most reports are just measuring the page itself. We want to measure the components. Continue reading →

One of the more confusing aspects of content strategy is the marketing analytics strategy. There are a lot of ways to measure the performance of your website, but when it comes to content analytics, I offer the following solution. But before we start, you may want to check out Part 1 of this three-part series.

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot more movies. it’s not because I have an abundance of free time on my hands. It’s actually because I’m trying to become a better marketing storyteller and I think movies will help me get there.

Over the past year or so one of the most abused terms has to be the word “storytelling.” Everyone seems to think that they are storytellers. This may not be true, as explained in this simple, profanity-laced rant by Stefan Sagmeister.

As a concept, storytelling is a great idea, particularly for content marketers. It’s a creative way to connect with your audience and put a human spin on products and services. If you’ve found a story that works for you, well, good for you.

Like any creative endeavor, storytelling takes practice. Even stories get better with multiple tellings, since you learn what works, what doesn’t, and how much information you need to lead up to the big finale in your tale. Continue reading →

Andrew Davis is the guy you want on your marketing team. He’s smart, passionate, funny, and has an uncanny knack for nailing it.

His book Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships captures the essential rules of modern digital marketing. And if you had to distill it down to just one idea, it would be that marketing isn’t for loners. These days, you have make some friends and try new things.

And Andrew Davis is very good at identifying good partnerships and great marketing. In his book, he writes about large and small companies that are discovering new customers, simply by thinking beyond their traditional owned, earned, and, well, whatever campaigns.

He is like your favorite coach who both applauds you for reaching a new personal best, but also suggests that you can do better. He deconstructs successful campaigns, admires the work, and then suggests clever ways to make it even better. He’s smart, nimble, and it comes through on every page of his book.

Despite his non-stop speaking schedule, Andrew found time to participate in an email interview with me.

BUDDY SCALERA: First, can you tell me what your book Brandscaping is all about?

ANDREW DAVIS: Brandscaping is all about leveraging the audiences of others to more effectively and efficiently sell your products and services. Essentially the entire book asks you one question: who already has your next customer as their current customer? Thinking this way opens up tons of new opportunities to work together, creating content that both your audiences will find valuable.Continue reading →

This was a busy year for me in terms of presentations and appearances. Content marketing has become a hot topic, so these days I’m out there talking about some of the how-to elements of getting started.

A few people have mentioned that I need to keep track of these speaking appearances better, so I created this post to document 2013.

FEBRUARY: February 7-8, 2013
The year kicked off with the Intelligent Content Conference 2013 in San Francisco. This event is one of the most technically advanced events, so the speakers are encouraged to talk about the how-to aspects of creating intelligent content. One of the organizers is Ann Rockley, who is an industry thought leader on XML-driven content. The other organizer is Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler, who is deeply involved with the technical details behind content management across multiple channels.

Anyway, I spoke at the ICC 2013 and delivered a presentation called “Channel-Agnostic Content Strategy for Happy Marketers.” It’s a deep dive into how content needs to be developed and managed to flow across multiple platforms. We had slightly tighter time slots, so the idea was to get into your story fast. It was a good approach that stripped out the fluff and forced you to get into the specifics of content formatting.

If you haven’t yet seen it, there’s a terrific infographic featuring the popular Marvel Comics superhero Wolverine. Much of the world became familiar with the Wolverine character through his portrayal by Hugh Jackman in the X-Men movies.

But Wolverine was a fan favorite, ever since his introduction in Incredible Hulk #181 (1974). The character exploded in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be an A-list character in the comics and on the silver screen.

I discovered an infographic on Gizmodo.com and was impressed with the way the designer managed to incorporate the right amount of design, text, and layout to this rather complex character.

This was no average fan. This was a pro designer at work and this infographic was quickly going viral. At the bottom of the infographic was a cleverly placed URL that drove you to a website where you can buy costumes.

Yep, you guessed it, there are even costumes of Wolverine. This was a fantastic example of visual content marketing in action. They knew who the audience was, what would draw them in, and how to get them to their target website.

Two of the architects behind this content marketing campaign were Kate Willeart and Mark Bietz. They sat down for a brief email interview to discuss their content strategy tactic from a marketing perspective. (Note: This is Part 1 of a 2-part series. Check out Part 2.)

BUDDY: To get started, can you introduce yourself and describe what you do?

Kate Willaert

KATE: My name is Kate Willaert, and I’m a graphic designer for Fun.com (and its sister sites HalloweenCostumes.com and T-Shirts.com). My job includes web design, creating t-shirt designs, and designing marketing materials such as infographics.

MARK: I’m Mark Bietz, VP of Marketing for Fun.com and I lead the marketing strategy here.

Just for context, there’s this great infographic that painstakingly details the costumes of the Marvel superhero character Wolverine. At the bottom is a URL for HalloweenCostumes.com. Can you describe how this project came about?

KATE: The Wolverine piece is actually the third in a series of superhero costume infographics I’ve designed, which previously included Iron Man and Superman. The inspiration came from an infographic I saw comparing the cost of Batman and Iron Man’s estates — their suits, their houses, their cars, etc. You get to the bottom of this infographic and see that it’s by an insurance company. I thought that was really clever. Continue reading →

But…I wanted to do something a little different. This time, I turn the tables and interview the convention organizer. In the hot seat is Steve Goldstein, who is the editorial director, events, for PR News. Let’s see what he has to say about the upcoming event…

BUDDY SCALERA: First off, hello. We’ve never actually met in person, but I am going to be speaking at one of your upcoming conferences. Can you tell me a little about the upcoming event?

STEVE GOLDSTEIN: What we’re doing is gathering thought leaders in content marketing from brands and from PR agencies to show PR professionals how they can help their brands and clients amp up their content strategy and, not incidentally, create content that’s shareable. Continue reading →